A multi-scale gated multi-head attention depthwise separable CNN model for recognizing COVID-19

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is a new acute respiratory disease that has spread rapidly throughout the world. In this paper, a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model named multi-scale gated multi-head attention depthwise separable CNN (MGMADS-CNN) is proposed, which is based on attention mechanism and depthwise separable convolution. A multi-scale gated multi-head attention mechanism is designed to extract effective feature information from the COVID-19 X-ray and CT images for classification. Moreover, the depthwise separable convolution layers are adopted as MGMADS-CNN’s backbone to reduce the model size and parameters. The LeNet-5, AlexNet, GoogLeNet, ResNet, VGGNet-16, and three MGMADS-CNN models are trained, validated and tested with tenfold cross-validation on X-ray and CT images. The results show that MGMADS-CNN with three attention layers (MGMADS-3) has achieved accuracy of 96.75% on X-ray images and 98.25% on CT images. The specificity and sensitivity are 98.06% and 96.6% on X-ray images, and 98.17% and 98.05% on CT images. The size of MGMADS-3 model is only 43.6 M bytes. In addition, the detection speed of MGMADS-3 on X-ray images and CT images are 6.09 ms and 4.23 ms for per image, respectively. It is proved that the MGMADS-3 can detect and classify COVID-19 faster with higher accuracy and efficiency.